Alumni

Welcome Alumni! Click here to tell us what you've been up to since graduation!

Greg Halzen ('10) - A graduate of the BBE Peace Corps Fellows Program, Greg teaches in New York City and was awarded the NABE (National Association for Bilingual Education) Teacher of the Year Award in 2012. He says "...in the end I will be accepting the award as encouragement to those of us that implement bilingual education (especially dual language) in environments that may have misunderstandings about bilingual education or even discriminatory world views leading their policies instead of data or research...There are many teachers who are better, but I suppose it is important to encourage efforts to stand up against the odds for dignity in multilingual communities especially if the number of bilingually certified educators is limited."

Silvestre Arcos ('10) - Currently teaching at the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, New York, he was recognized in 2012 by Teaching Tolerance and Education Week with the Culturally Responsive Teaching Award. Read more here.

Beth Pollak ('07) - Beth is teaching at MS 328 (164th and Amsterdam near Washington Heights). She is the 6th and 7th grade science teacher for dual-language, bilingual, and ESL classes. She enjoys every second of teaching and working with the students, and it's a great challenge of course to differentiate the instruction for such a variety of levels and students.

Dulce Noriega ('04) - After graduating from the program, Dulce went back to California, where she worked as a fourth grade teacher in a district that had a high EL population and migrant community. Many of her students parents worked in the fields. Dulce then went back to the border where she had grown up to her own middle school where she worked as an 8th grade language arts teacher. The experience was wonderful, yet frustrating. Times had changed, and so had some of the staff. Due to NCLB the school like many others found itself pressed. Thus the district thought that by having its principals and superintendents monitoring the border crossing on foot they could identify students, turn their names into the schools and have them pay out of state tuition or have them pulled out of the school district. Most of these kids could not stay afterschool for the tutoring because they had to travel back to the border, or the school could not get in touch with their parents because their parents lived across the border. Dulce and her husband later settled in a small town call San Jacinto. This town is located an hour south of L.A and 20 minutes north of Temecula (the wine country of Southern California). She is one of the few Latina teachers in her district. She is currently teaching fifth grade.